A/N: Fifty! Halfway!

Anyway, this is what happens when I just start writing without any direction. Just, start off, one sentence leads to the next until you get what looks like some sort of story. Lots of fun for me and making absolutely no sense at all. Let me know if you can figure out what this is about, I certainly can't :)

Yay for randomness!


77. Test

"Clockwork?"

The silence in the tunnel was oppressive, and his voice sounded out of place and loud in the darkness. He touched the wall, felt its smooth, black surface, trying to feel some reality in this forbidding place. Not that there was something, anything, close to reality in the ghost zone. It had its own rules, which also annoyingly differed from place to place. Like this labyrinth. It forced him on the ground, forced gravity on him. He couldn't fly here. He didn't like that.

"Clockwork!"

He didn't like the rasping sound of his voice either. It sounded like he was afraid, at the end of his powers, tired. He wasn't, not yet. He could go on for hours, forcing his fatigue away, forcing his fears to the back of his mind where they wouldn't bother him. He never allowed them to come to the surface. He was the hero, the strong one, the one people, his friends, depended on. He was fearless.

Ignoring the churning feeling in his stomach – since when did ghosts have stomachs, anyway – he moved forward, his right hand sliding on the wall, his left held forward, controlling the small green orb that lighted his path.

The floor was made of black cobble stones, the ceiling... He couldn't figure out the ceiling. It wasn't there. When he looked up, he only saw blackness, an uneasy darkness that made him feel like he was looking into an abyss. It made the uneasy feeling in his stomach worse – not fear, he wasn't afraid – so he resolved himself to not look at it. Just look down, or at the walls. He didn't really need to see what was above him to find his way through this maze. To find his friends. It should have been easy.

He came at an intersection and stopped. The small green orb hovered in front of him, lighting only a small part of the long hallways leading away from him. They looked identical. Which one?

He directed some more energy to his glowing orb, lighting more of the hallways. They seemed endless. He turned to look at where he came from, and it looked the same. How was he supposed to choose a direction if everything looked exactly the same?

"Clockwork, darn it!"

To take his mind of the annoying labyrinth, he started thinking about the equally annoying ghost of time. Sometimes an ally, more often an enemy, but always manipulating, working according to his own agenda. The observers thought they knew him, knew what he stood for, what he was trying to accomplish, but Danny knew better. Nobody could understand the motivations of the shape shifting ghost, for only he could see everything. Every possibility. Every twist and turn. If Clockwork found it necessary to have him dead, just so a more preferable future could come to pass, he'd have him killed without so much as batting an eye. Definitely not an ally.

He closed his eyes, let the orb dissipate. The tunnels looked the same. They didn't feel the same. Now that he had shut down his most important sensory input, his eyes, he could use the others. His hearing was gone too. The silence was absolute. Even his breathing, his heartbeat were gone. He removed his hand from the wall. No touch. Normally, that would have left smell and taste, but as a ghost, he didn't have those. At least, not with his nose or mouth.

He didn't know how to describe it. It was like smelling. Like tasting. His sixth sense, his ghost sense, the sense that was unreliable at best, or downright wrong at its worst. The sense that warned him of danger, of the proximity of other people or ghosts, of good or bad intentions. Emotions. People's emotions. A source of energy. A source he purposefully cut off, kept a firm lock on. Ghosts fed on people's emotions. There were happy emotions, love, pride, excitement. And there were the darker emotions, disgust, frustration, distress. Anger. Hate.

But the most powerful of them all, the emotion that almost all ghosts went after, the reason ghosts were feared at all, was fear. And Danny feared that fear. Because he wasn't convinced that he would be able to resist its lure, its powerful aura once he opened that particular door. So he kept it closed. He would not use emotions.

Straight ahead was neutral. Nothing came of it, not a ripple. A glass of tasteless water. Safe. From the right, a slight feeling of happiness bubbled to him, far away and unreachable, growing weaker as he tried to focus his attention to it. From the left, the dreaded fear.

It wasn't strong. A mild fear. A fear of having to hold a speech in front of a large audience maybe, a fear of going to a new school for the first time. He turned to the tunnel and swallowed. He now knew what this was about. But he wasn't sure about what was expected of him.

The fear tugged at him, enveloped him, tried to drag him in. He backed away from it, then turned and ran into the opposite direction, towards happiness. As soon as he did that, the fear subsided, and a slight giddy feeling came over him. He started laughing as he was running in the total darkness, the feeling of total satisfaction that he had run away from it momentarily clouding his common sense.

The tunnel had seemed endless. There really was no reason for him to run into a solid wall so soon.

He bounced backwards and hit the floor painfully. For a while, he just laid there, gasping for the air he didn't need, fighting the nausea that washed over him. He wondered if he had a concussion. It certainly felt like it, the way the floor seemed to roll and heave under him. After a while, he pushed himself up and lit another ecto ball. It flickered and sizzled for a moment, but then hung steady. A dead end.

He felt his head and then looked at the green blood on his gloves. Cursing softly, he got to his knees and then on his feet. Then, with one last sour look at the wall that had suddenly blocked his path, he retraced his steps back to the intersection.

Straight ahead, fear. To the right, love. To the left, anger. He was supposed to pick one.

"Why don't you just tell me what you expect of me," he said angrily, "Why do you have to play these stupid games?"

He stared at the tunnel which radiated anger. It was the tunnel he came from. It hadn't felt like that before. He felt his anger grow, he could almost tasted it. It had a metallic taste to it. Like blood. As soon as he realized that, he turned away from it. He was pretty sure he wasn't supposed to pick that road.

The fear in front of him still pulled. It seemed stronger now, seeping into him. It almost made his mouth water. With some effort, he turned right. Love would be alright. He couldn't really go wrong there, could he?

Cautiously, he stepped through the tunnel, lighting his way with the glowing green orb. The feeling was there, seemingly coming out of the walls, making him smile in anticipation. It brought out his own love, his love for his parents, his sister, his friends. Especially one friend in particular. He could see her face in front of him, her smile, her purple eyes, looking back at him. And then he saw them.

They were standing there, right in front of him, smiling at him, waving. He waved back and rushed forward to meet them, his glowing ball floating ahead of him. This time, he saw it coming. The green orb bounced back against an invisible wall, and he stopped just in time. Tentatively, he placed his hands on the glass. His parents. Jazz. Sam and Tucker. They were calling to him, waving, laughing. The love was coming from them. He couldn't reach them. He was cut off.

Tears started running down his face as he pounded his fists on the glass, trying to break through. He needed their love, he couldn't exist without it. He knew all too well what would become of him if they were taken away from him. But it was no use. As he watched, they somehow got further away from him, their tiny figures moving down the tunnel, and he couldn't follow. He was alone again.

With a heavy heart, he turned around, back to the intersection. He had a feeling he finally knew which tunnel he was supposed to pick. The intersection appeared ahead of him and he hesitated, slowing down his steps until he came to a complete standstill about three feet away from the intersection.

Fear to the right. Pulsating, throbbing, vibrating in his chest. The feeling of power, thundering through his mind, almost blocking all other feelings. He moved closer. Straight ahead, the vague, calm feeling of contentment. To his left, annoyance. They were unimportant.

He turned right.


"Hi Mrs Fenton, how's Danny doing?"

"Oh, hi, Tucker, Sam, why don't you go up and see for yourself? He was still sleeping earlier, no surprise after a night like that, but maybe it's time he woke up."

Sam paused at the bottom of the stairs. "What do you mean, a 'night like that'?"

"He was tossing and turning, and we just couldn't wake him up. He calmed down in the morning though. Go on, go see him. I need to get some rest."

The two friends quickly ran up the stairs like they always did, taking the steps two at a time. Jazz stuck her head out of her room, frowned at them and pointedly closed the door. It was Saturday morning, not too early, in fact, just early enough to still call it morning. Sam hesitated at her friend's door, until Tucker nudged her, a devilish grin on his face.

"Afraid he's naked?"

She scowled at him and opened the door. The room was shaded, the curtains still closed. The sun was trying to protrude the dark blue fabric of them, with only limited success. A narrow beam of sunlight lit the NASA poster on the opposite wall. Under the poster, a bed. On the bed, a sleeping teenage boy with black, messy hair, wearing a white tank top. His breathing was rasping, his face pale, but he didn't look as bad as Sam remembered from the day before. She walked closer and touched his arm.


It consumed him. He was on an incredible high, the rush he felt was almost unbearable. He heard an insane laughter, a loud, boyish voice, and realized it was himself he was hearing. Colors exploded in front of his eyes, an incredible brightness, a powerful feeling of being. He could do anything, he was all powerful. With a flip of his finger he could root out trees, or tip buildings. With one blast, he could take down a city, burn it to the ground, wipe it off the face of the earth more thoroughly than a nuclear bomb could. His wail... he shuddered. Even in this state, he didn't want to think about what his ghostly wail could do.

Fear. He needed it. Needed more of it. He could never let it go. He let himself drift on the waves, a mad roller coaster ride in hell. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, he knew he was failing. Failing a test. It was unimportant. He was burning inside, fueled by the fear that was still around him, clutching it, taking it all in.

A cool hand on his arm.

He blinked in surprise at the unexpectedness of it. Then he dismissed it. It was unimportant, a minor distraction, easily disposed off. He grabbed the hand and tried to push it away. And he couldn't let go. His hand wrapped itself around a slender wrist, and the cool hand stayed on his arm, now clutching it desperately. He tried to tear himself away, but couldn't. What was he doing?

Slowly, somewhere deep inside of him, the feeling returned, the feeling of how it had felt when he had fallen down in the playground and his mother picked him up. The feeling of hot chocolate in the fall, the feeling of jumping in the cool water of the pool in the summer. Two amethyst eyes staring at him.

"Sam," he croaked.

"Danny," she said, "You're hurting me."

With some effort, he let go of her, and she started rubbing her wrist. To his dismay, he saw red, finger shaped marks on it. Tucker stared at him, a worried expression on his face.

"I'm so sorry, Sam," Danny said, "I didn't mean to hurt you."

He looked around his room. Everything was as it should be. Nothing strange, nothing to make him suspect he was still in the ghost zone, still being manipulated by the ghost of time. Of course, being in his own bedroom didn't mean he wasn't being manipulated. With some effort, he popped himself up on one arm.

"Clockwork, you bastard," he said, much to the surprise of his friends, "Now did I pass your stupid test or not?"